Review: Think Burning Man meets the end of the world: This Pulitzer winners new book is a chaotic trip
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Set us as preferred Book ReviewPly By Hernan Diaz Riverhead Books: 464 pages, $35If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.It’s a cause for celebration when a great novelist publishes a new book.That said, readers who became fans of Hernan Diaz for his novel “Trust,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, may be disoriented by “Ply,” his latest.
Where “Trust” was a sharply controlled exploration of capitalism set in the past, “Ply” is practically the opposite — a sprawling far-future narrative of a life lived on the margins.Few writers have the ambition to make such a drastic shift.Our heroine, called simply “the pincher,” resides in a decaying city that resembles New York.
Centuries of depopulation, rising seas and possibly disasters have left it mostly empty, buildings teetering.While this might sound dystopic to us, for the pincher the city is perfect.She’s seen what it used to be, all garish consumption.
“That supposed magnificence was nothing compared to the landscape before me,” she thinks, biking across the midtown bridge at twilight.“There was freedom in dissolution, joy in disorder.”There are no schools, hospitals or public transportation; for those who remain, commerce is done via trade.
The pincher’s stomping grounds are in downtown, which, like Manhattan in the 1970s, is a great place to get drugs and see music.People from the wealthier, uptown neighborhoods come for both.
The only vestiges of social order are a vigilante police force and the power company.The pincher is called that because she’s an electricity pirate.Sometimes she gives away her talents to the bands she loves; she charges those she doesn’t; and she does gigs for an ornately-spoken mafia type.Orphaned at a young age, ...